"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

If I could change my career at the snap of a finger, I'd be an astronomer. There's just so much cool stuff out there to see. I've been toying with the idea of buying a really good telescope the last couple of years, but know nothing about them, and even less about astronomy itself.

"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

I prefer to think that in one of those galaxies theres some form of alien life that consist entirely of sex starved hot naked blue chicks.

"My great-grandfather did not travel across four thousand miles of the Atlantic Ocean to see this nation overrun by immigrants. He did it because he killed a man back in Ireland. That's the rumor."-Stephen Colbert

Most pictures taken by Hubble are actually black and white, then they let loose some nut on LSD to smear pretty colors all over so whenever I see one of these impressive pictures I just think to myself "shop'd".

Most pictures taken by Hubble are actually black and white, then they let loose some nut on LSD to smear pretty colors all over so whenever I see one of these impressive pictures I just think to myself "shop'd".

Most pictures taken by Hubble are actually black and white, then they let loose some nut on LSD to smear pretty colors all over so whenever I see one of these impressive pictures I just think to myself "shop'd".

Well, to a point. Most of the pictures that they use to show off are taken in black and white, but the white represents one of 3 or 4 colors (essentially the equivalent of blue, green, yellow, and red). They color in the white with the "proper" color and then overlay and combine them. At this point the press people at STScI (essentially the Hubble Institute) go to an artist they have on staff and say, "Make it look pretty." So overall it's not real, but if you know where they started there is still some good information there. For instance, in the Hubble Deep Field picture above any galaxy that looks blue is in fact mostly blue and full of large, hot, young stars. It's all about trying to define what color really means, and that's a longer discussion.

I know Hubble produces good science I just don't like how they allow people to believe that these pictures are real, their beauty is mostly from the spectacular colours, which themselves are mostly bullshit. If you were to somehow get close enough to that blue galaxy to see it with the naked eye it almost certainly wouldn't actually be blue. At best they are using the color blue to denote heat or a high concentration of a particular molecule and at worst the artist who was told to make it look sexy just made it up.

Hey danny, make this original photo look good so we can release it:

Sure thing boss, I thougt a combination of aqua-greens and deep yellow-orange would really make it pop!:

Well, the light from the edges of the object is likely due to the 656.3nm emission line from single ionized hydrogen, which is in the red part of the spectrum. Looking down through the middle of the object is likely a dense region of singly and doubly ionized oxygen, with emission line wavelengths of 323.7nm and a few lines ~500 nm, all of which are in the blue/blue-green part of the visible spectrum.

Is that what the object would look like if we were there in space? No. The main reason for that is the gas is at such a low density there just isn't enough light being made for your eyes to pick up the individual colors. But it's the closest approximation to what the emission line spectra are telling us about the object. I also know that the artists typically (~50-75%) of the time talk to the astronomers who took the images to find out what colors they should work with. The exact shade of red and blue are up to the artist, but the starting colors are pretty much set in stone. (Again, this is true for most pictures. I have seen some of them with the colors completely out of whack, but they're good for the most part.)

The pretty colors aren't what impresses me. The whole vastness of the universe thing, that's what I thought was noteworthy. The whole "Hm, I live on a planet that can house billions of people just like me, and it's a speck of dust compared to a real planet like Jupiter, which itself is hilariously small next to the Sun, which is dwarfed by a lot of other stars, and our galaxy is composed of billions of those stars, and there are billions of galaxies, each full of billions of stars with their own planets. Stressing about work seems kind of silly right now." thing.

That the saints may enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God more abundantly they are permitted to see the punishment of the damned in hell. -Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica

For instance, in the Hubble Deep Field picture above any galaxy that looks blue is in fact mostly blue and full of large, hot, young stars. It's all about trying to define what color really means, and that's a longer discussion.

The pretty colors aren't what impresses me. The whole vastness of the universe thing, that's what I thought was noteworthy. The whole "Hm, I live on a planet that can house billions of people just like me, and it's a speck of dust compared to a real planet like Jupiter, which itself is hilariously small next to the Sun, which is dwarfed by a lot of other stars, and our galaxy is composed of billions of those stars, and there are billions of galaxies, each full of billions of stars with their own planets. Stressing about work seems kind of silly right now." thing.

I assume everyone has seen this and this. I have real trouble imagining such scale.

I know Hubble produces good science I just don't like how they allow people to believe that these pictures are real, their beauty is mostly from the spectacular colours, which themselves are mostly bullshit. If you were to somehow get close enough to that blue galaxy to see it with the naked eye it almost certainly wouldn't actually be blue. At best they are using the color blue to denote heat or a high concentration of a particular molecule and at worst the artist who was told to make it look sexy just made it up.

Not really. Ravandor does a good job of talking to this. They are done to entertain the public as well as the scientists (hey, everybody likes pretty pictures), but they're based on something very real. Astronomy is all about light - looking for both specific emission lines (such as the ionized gas mentioned), or absorbtion lines. Astronomy relies heavily on light to determine properties of an object. So, when taking photos of something they're likely to get multiple shots, each of which is "black and white", or more specifically, targetted to specific frequencies of light which do not always have to be visible. Some shots are composites of visible light, but others aren't. In some cases the light is redshifted enough to not even be visible, even if it originally was. Or what is visible was originally above UV. Or the contrast on something is so great that you can't see the greater structure. When talking about astronomy, especially very far away things like the deep image, what an object "really" looks like requires some amount of definition. I would argue that they are real, at least as real as we can get; it is showing actual structure of the objects photographed, with colors that are pretty but also mean something.

"Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don't learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us." -SC